Walk-On to Start-Up: Van Meter Finds Success in Medical Sales, Entrepreneurship
Written by Doug Goodnough
Dave Van Meter’s basketball career at Hillsdale College was brief. As a walk-on guard, he played only his freshman year for the Chargers.
But what a year it was.
The 1991 graduate eventually worked his way into playing time on the basketball court, using his gritty, hard-nosed playing style to earn the team’s Most Improved Player by season’s end. It was those qualities, as well as what he learned off the court at Hillsdale, that have helped propel him into a successful career in medical sales and entrepreneurship.
“I went to visit Hillsdale with a guy from my high school who they were recruiting for football,” said Van Meter, a native of Birmingham, Michigan. “A guy named Pat who was from my high school was a grade higher than me, and I went and stayed with him when I visited. And I just loved it.”
When he arrived at Hillsdale, he quickly learned what college basketball was all about.
“I remember going into that rubber floor gym right as school was starting, and there were a couple of guys from the basketball team,” Van Meter said of the old practice gym at Stock’s Fieldhouse. “So these are the basketball players? And I just remember J.J. (Tharp) raining threes and going, ‘What have I gotten myself into here?’”
He also learned about team rules that did not allow basketball players to join fraternities. Van Meter quickly tested that policy, rushing the Delta Tau Delta house.
“I really wanted to do that. I just decided it’s nobody’s business,” he said. “If I’m walking on, I’m not a scholarship player.”
Thanks to his teammates’ silence, the coaches never found out, and Van Meter was able to join.
However, his basketball career ended after his freshman year. His mother passed away the summer after that season, and that impacted Van Meter negatively. He eventually decided not to return to the team.
“I was just dealing with a few things, and my grades had slipped,” he said.
An English major at the time, he said he was on a path to failing out of school when Hillsdale professor Michael Bauman stepped in to get him through a very difficult time.
“He was fantastic,” Van Meter said. “Bauman was there for me.”
After a rough sophomore year, Van Meter’s grades recovered and he decided to add political science as a double major. He eventually was part of the first group of Hillsdale students to spend a semester in Oxford at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
Coming from a family of lawyers, Van Meter thought law school was his next stop.
“After I graduated, I realized that I wanted to apply to business school,” he said.
Without taking a single business class at Hillsdale, Van Meter was accepted into the University of Notre Dame’s business school. During his time there, he took an unpaid internship for a medical device company in Southern California.
“I knew medical devices was a good place to be,” he said of the experience.
After completing his MBA, Van Meter returned to California and quickly got a sales job in the industry.
“I launched some products, which without a science background was a lot of fun for me,” he said.
He worked for several medium to large companies, helping market products and leading a sales team. His success took him to Abbott, one of the largest medical sales companies in the U.S. He was eventually promoted to vice president, and in his late 30s, was one of the youngest vice presidents in his division.
However, Van Meter decided to bet on himself. Working with venture capitalists and a founder who helped create a new stent-like device to treat glaucoma, he helped launch his own company in 2008. As president and CEO of Ivantis, he grew the company from two to 200 employees by the time it was sold in 2022.
“When you do a startup company, you’re either a total failure or a total success, typically,” said Van Meter, who admitted he knew very little about ophthalmology going into the process. “And the CEO usually gets too much credit or too much blame. But luckily, we succeeded with ours.”
Married with a young family at the time, he said it was a big risk.
“So that’s not usually when you leave a solid situation,” he said of starting a new business. “I had 60 days to learn the product, the arena, and then go convince investors to put money into it. And luckily, we did.”
He credits his Hillsdale education for much of his sales success.
“If you’re a CEO at a startup company, it all starts with raising money,” Van Meter said. “And that starts with being able to tell a story and think critically. I certainly didn’t have a science background, but I learned how to communicate ideas. You go into a room and you have an hour to convince people of really complicated stuff as simply as you can at a level that they want to invest. And it’s 100 percent the communication that I learned at Hillsdale that made that happen. I always tell people that I’m a huge liberal arts fan as a result of that.”
For the past two years, Van Meter’s full-time job has been being the father to his three children. Residing in the Laguna Beach area for the past 16 years, he still consults with venture capitalists and is a member of several health device boards.
“I am so happy to have the opportunity to work remotely and be around for my kids,” he said of his three children, ages 13 to 16. “They are at ages where they need me, and it’s way more important to me to be around for them than go chase another opportunity. I just love being a dad.”
Van Meter, who is an avid fitness buff and wants one day to move back to his home state of Michigan, admitted he may eventually start another company. But now is not the right time.
“We built something pretty special. It took a long time,” he said. “I love the people I worked with, and it would be hard for me to reproduce that. So I’m in no hurry. I’m enjoying being on the other side now where I’m helping other investors.”
Doug Goodnough, ’90, is Hillsdale’s director of Alumni Marketing. He enjoys connecting with fellow alumni in new and wonderful ways.
Published in April 2024